Home

Introduction

About my first experience with FPGAs

I discovered my passion for microcontrollers and FPGAs during my PhD in (quantum) physics. Very helpful in this regard was the Arduino IDE, a microcontroller programming environment for the profane folks, i.e. makers, enthusiasts and scientists without a degree in electrical engineering. The situation is different for FPGAs, where learning VHDL/Verilog, understanding the chipset architecture and using the huge Xilinx/Intel toolchain involve a steep initial learning curve and a significant amount of frustration. But once these hurdles are overcome, you are capable of designing your own signal generation/acquisition systems and replace many of your old OP-27 circuits with an FPGA running a few lines of code. I had no prior experience in FPGA programming and to reach this point took me several months, where the biggest limitation was the lack of simple programming examples and hands-on tutorials.

About these notes

These notes intend to speed up the initial learning curve by providing working examples that incrementally incorporate new FPGA programming concepts. The hardware and software platform I use for this are:

• Redpitaya STEMlab 125-14: development board around the Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, which combines an ARM processor and a FPGA. The board includes digital IOs and 14-bit ADCs/DACs that operate at 125MSa/s.

• Xilinx Vivado Webpack: free version of this very complete FPGA design tool.

• PYNQ: Python environment to control FPGA designs and stream data into/out of them. It is based on Jupyter Notebooks that are executed on the ARM processor of the Zynq-7010 SoC.

Outline

• Setting up your system
• LED blink
• Analogue echo